Template Edit HTML vs Layouts UI in Blogger

In Blogger, there are two entry points to customize templates. One is Templates, where you can edit the HTML & CSS for the blog, and the other is Layout, which lets you quickly add or delete widgets. Blogger has done a wonderful job at making it simple for beginners to add some widgets and get a professional looking blog ready in minutes. At the same time the Template option is very powerful and if you are a nerd like me, it will keep you occupied and make you feel in control of your blog's look and feel. However, there is a problem.

Template -> Edit HTML

Once we update a template with custom code and have made too many changes, like for this website, it becomes impossible for Layout UI to remain in sync with those changes and display the proper widgets. Now if we just open Layout and save it, it makes some unwanted changes in our HTML. So, it's very important that once we have reached a level of comfort with code we should try to completely avoid using Layouts to control the blog.

We can have another dummy blog where we can try and add things through Layout and copy the code that was generated to our main blog's code, thus avoiding going through Layout page.